Noble-metal nanoparticles have had a substantial impact across a diverse range of fields, including catalysis, sensing, photochemistry, optoelectronics, energy conversion, and medicine. Gold nanoparticles have long been favored over silver nanoparticles in part because of their stability. However, silver nanoparticles have potentially more applications than gold nanoparticles due to their superior optical properties, bioactivity, diversity of chemical and photochemical properties, and lower cost.
The development of silver nanoparticles has been hindered by the instability of silver nanoparticles. The ease of oxidation has limited the development of these materials. A further difficulty with silver nanoparticle development has been size distribution. Single-sized products have generally only been isolated by attrition, wherein the less stable sizes are either destroyed or converted into the most stable size. For these reasons, despite the possible applications, chemically inert and long-term stable silver nanomaterials remain unrealized.